Re-thinking Your Brand Communication in 2020
A new year gives us a time to reflect, revise, and strategize the way forward. We believe this is a great time to review all aspects of your brand, including the way you’re communicating with your audience. As we were brainstorming ideas for a year-end (or year-beginning) post on Henryk Cultivated, we stumbled upon this video clip of Steve Jobs introducing Apple’s newest marketing campaign back in 1997. This clip may be over a decade old, but it couldn’t be more relevant for today’s marketers and brand builders.
Early in the clip, Jobs talks about the need for brands to cut through all the noise and be memorable to an audience. He suggests that marketing is about values. It’s not about focused communication on what makes a product great (features, price, capability) or better than the competition — it’s not about the commodity that you sell. Rather, it’s about who you are as a brand and what you stand for. That’s what people care about. Products and services are easily replicable. If a brand doesn’t currently have commodity competition, chances are they soon will. Once everyone is selling the same product, how does differentiation occur? That’s where brand comes in and how you thoughtfully communicate about it with your audience.
A bit later in the clip, as Jobs moves on to introducing the new marketing campaign, he stresses the importance of brand communication that’s founded in a brand’s set of core values — because regardless of how products and services change, a brand’s values never should. Whether you’re building a personal brand, a B2B brand, or a B2C brand, the fundamental values that you stand for should be the guiding principles for how your brand operates. Sure, we might add to our set of values as we shift, grow, and learn, but that doesn’t change the resting place for these values, and that’s at the foundation of everything a brand says and does.
“… values and core values… those things shouldn’t change.”
When a brand is clear about their values and chooses to lead with them, it’s easier to know exactly what and how to best communicate them to an audience. Jobs gives the example of Nike. Love them or hate them, Nike is one of the strongest brands in existence today, and definitely was way back in 1997. He reminds us that at the end of the day, Nike is still selling a commodity, but that’s not what the brand chooses to communicate. Instead, Nike focuses their marketing on honouring athletes and great athletics — this is what the Nike brand values. By leading with their values, Nike communicates a message that tells the audience about far more than just the shoes or sportswear they sell. It gives the audience something greater to connect with, develops more meaningful engagement, and establishes a more memorable brand in the minds of consumers — three impactful outcomes that move the brand from simply having a transactional relationship with their customers, to one that’s deeper and longer lasting.
As we settle in to this new year, we urge you to take a moment to watch this clip (7 minutes), reflect on your brand, your values, and how (or if) you’re choosing to consciously lead with them in your brand’s communication. Let’s make 2020 less about transactional associations and more about relational ones.
Happy New Year!
If you’d like to chat more about your brand’s values and how you can weave them through your brand communication, drop us a line at hello@henrykbrandingco.com.